Users of mobile devices or mobile user equipment (UE) are increasingly becoming more sophisticated in terms of the functionality that they require from their mobile devices and the way that they access data from the mobile devices.
Dynamic content delivery allows users to have information or data pushed to them or allows users to pull the data from content providers. Examples of data could include stock quotes, weather updates, traffic updates, dynamic wallpaper, ads, applications or other data desirable to a user.
Content can be either pushed to a mobile device by a content provider or requested (pulled) from the content provider by the mobile device.
With pull-based delivery, the content is requested by a client application on the mobile device and delivered to the device in a response message. The problem with this approach is that the client application does not know about the availability of content from a content provider and needs to periodically pull content, thus wasting wireless bandwidth on unsuccessful attempts. This model does not provide a good user experience as frequent pull attempts affect network resources and ultimately the customer's monthly bill, while infrequent attempts result in outdated content.
With push mode delivery, the client application establishes a content subscription with a content provider. The application provides subscription filters that specify events of interest. The content provider applies the subscription filter to the available content, and if some content subset matches the filter, pushes this content to the mobile device using the available content delivery framework. This approach requires a complex content delivery infrastructure including subscription and content management on the push server and the content provider. The scalability for a large number of devices is a major obstacle for implementation, due to the complexity of managing multiple timer events and filters.